things that will never happen

Bird came to town, flying in on the evening of the full moon and leaving on the evening of the longest day of the year, and she can find poetry buried under anything. or out of nothing.

Fonda and I discovered something wonderful this last week. We didn't do it on purpose. It was simply through a certain laziness and our lumpy attention spans that we stumbled across this little known path to better living. We discovered a way to approximate the state of nothingness. Nothingness is a scary state, but approximating it can be a lot of fun. The trick to nothingness is planning.

I was in Florida for exactly three days. I was there to see Fonda, period. I had stated one dozen times that I didn't care what I did in Florida, as long as I was there with Fonda. But, the minute she picked me up at the Tampa airport and she and I joined forces, we were like two nine year old neighbor kids who were getting together just as school let out for summer. This is what we had planned within three miles of the airport parking: We were going to spend one full day in Tampa and go to a Cuban restaurant in old Ybor, before or after seeing the collection at the Salvador Dali Museum, with a side trip to St. Pete Beach. I know I've forgotten something, probably visiting some place called Little Manatee, which sounded wholly exotic to me. By the time we'd reached her house, I was going to meet some of Fonda's friends, bicycle over to the Ca d'Zan Ringling Mansion for Thursday evening cocktails on the bay, work out with Fonda's new personal trainer, kayak tandem around the whole bay, check out the brand new All Freaks and Gays Night at the local margarita bar. The first night we managed to cook dinner.

The following day Fonda and I continued our planning while in our bathing suits and by the pool. We fed the fish and made oatmeal while we arranged in our minds how we were going to meet Fonda's friends and where. There were only so many hours left before cocktails at the Ringling mansion, so we prepared ourselves for that over lunch. Lunch wore us out a little, so Fonda announced she needed to lie down. The dogs and cat and I joined her, and everyone but Fonda fell fast asleep. She was very busy on her laptop finding just the perfect movie for us to go see that night. The nap gave me enough new energy to help Fonda narrow our movie selection down to twelve. By that time, well into cocktail hour at the mansion, the dogs needed a walk and let us know this. We weren't at the party, so we made our own cocktails and took them with us on our walk to the bay. In all this activity we never stopped planning. I set my heart on searching out abandoned mango trees in the neighborhood and returning after dark to pick my fill. A chance meeting with a neighbor got us started onto a radical new plan. The neighbor works at Ringling and offered us a private guided tour of the mansion's secret tower, an area off limits to everyone else in the world. Wow, that would fit in perfectly between everything else tomorrow. We finished our cocktails and walked home. Fonda's James cooked us all a dinner of the gods that evening. While James picked herbs from the garden for his sauce the two of us lay on cool tiles and draped ourselves over porch swings and planned some more. We did make jello that night.

It went on like this for three days, until I fell into a state of full relaxation. The trick is to plan, and then to not do. I don't think it works if you plan to do nothing. You have to plan to do something. And lots of it. And then you lie down on cool tiles and let the plans pass, even as you're making new ones.

Fonda and I talked one evening about how innocent and even seductive nothingness was to both of us when we were very very young. Each of us confessed to having induced as young children a sort of regression exercise in our little brains. It was a regression of time, age, of identity. We carefully worked our way back to the very beginning of us, and then we pushed the slightest bit further back, until we crossed over from us, to no us, to nothingness. For each of us there was a thrill to it. A pleasure, such that we went there again and again and again. Neither of us knows when it stopped, but we both know we can't do it anymore. Now nothingness is the scary place we're headed for with all inevitability. But once it was an expansive comfort. For now we better stick to approximating nothingness.